lensEU: Major European Newsrooms Team Up to Bring EU Affairs Home
A new weekly podcast and newsletter, produced in five languages, aims to make European politics feel relevant to the people it actually affects.
EU decisions shape energy bills, data rights, housing markets and election integrity across the continent. Yet for most Europeans, Brussels might as well be another world. lensEU - the Localised European News Service - was built on a simple conviction: people engage with politics when they can follow it in their own language.
Launched in April, lensEU will deliver a 30-minute podcast every Tuesday starting today, as well as a newsletter every Friday, both produced in English and translated into Polish, Latvian, German and Croatian. The idea is to give audiences across Europe a shared view of the same stories, without asking them to read the news in a second language.
Over its 24-month run, the project will bring together 8 media partners to produce more than 350 pieces of journalism across 5 languages - one among the most ambitious multilingual editorial collaborations in recent European media.
Coverage will focus on the issues that cut across borders: housing affordability, the green transition, disinformation and foreign interference in elections, the power of Big Tech platforms, inflation and economic insecurity. Each episode will ground EU-level debates in on-the-ground reporting, with expert analysis of what's at stake, and what policymakers are actually doing about it.
To keep the coverage genuinely pan-European rather than shaped by any one national perspective, editorial leadership rotates between partners throughout the project. Content will be distributed across partner platforms and available for free on The Audio Marketplace (TAM), a shared European audio infrastructure that boosts both reach and long-term discoverability.
Partners
lensEU is coordinated by OKO.press (Poland) alongside Die Presse (Austria), CORRECTIV (Germany), Telegram.hr (Croatia) and TVNET (Latvia), with support from international news agency AFP (France), ENEX (Luxembourg) and Mainspring (Austria).
The project is co-funded by the European Union under the Multimedia Actions programme and runs for 24 months from April 2026.
